US man to pay fine for unauthorized 1998 Cuba visit

July 24, 2012|Reuters

* Case is finally settled with $6,500 fine

* Traveler's lawyer says the fine is vindictive

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI, July 24 (Reuters) - A New York man agreed on Tuesdayto pay a $6,500 fine to settle a long-running dispute with theU.S. Treasury Department over a trip he made to Cuba as anunauthorized tourist 14 years ago.

Zachary Sanders, now 38, said he was 23 and had been livingand teaching English in Mexico when he decided to go to Cuba fora couple of weeks in 1998.

"I wanted to learn about how a socialist country worked inpractice," Sanders said in an interview. "I had no illusions.... I'm not like some diehard supporter of the (Cuban)government or anything like that."

The United States has long restricted U.S. travel to Cuba aspart of a 50-year-old trade embargo aimed at punishing Cuba'scommunist government. The actual restrictions and the degree ofenforcement have varied with different U.S. administrations andwith the evolving state of U.S.-Cuba relations.

Sanders did not obtain the required U.S. Treasury license tovisit Cuba and a U.S. Customs agent became suspicious whenSanders returned to the United States through the Bahamaswithout declaring that he had been to Cuba. The agent alsoseized an undeclared box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage.

Two years later, Sanders received a letter from the TreasuryDepartment asking for details of his expenditures in Cuba. Hesaid he was scared, had lost the receipts and missed thedeadline to return the form.

Another two years went by and the department's Office ofForeign Assets Control (OFAC) reviewed his case during a Bushadministration crackdown on travel to Cuba, notifying Sanders ofits intent to fine him for failing to return the form. In 2008,an administrative law judge fined him $1,000.

Both sides appealed, and on the final business day of theBush administration in January 2009, a Treasury administratorraised the fine to $9,000. He reasoned that the original finewas too low to discourage people from ignoring OFAC forms.

Sanders had a constitutional right not to provideincriminating evidence against himself, said his lawyer, ShaneKadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

By the time the fine was issued, Sanders had successfullybattled cancer, completed law school and been admitted to lawpractice in New York, where he is a sole practitioner who mainlyrepresents poor immigrants.

He also passed the bar exam in New Jersey, but was deniedadmission to that state's bar because he acknowledged that hehad gone to Cuba knowing it was illegal.

Sanders sued OFAC, the Treasury Department and the JusticeDepartment in federal court in 2009, appealing the fine asarbitrary and capricious. He lost and then turned to the U.S.Court of Appeals in New York, where Tuesday's settlementagreement was filed.

Kadidal said Sanders' fine was still far greater than mostAmericans pay for violating the travel ban, and suggested he hadbeen singled out because he was "an ideological traveler."

Civil penalties for tourist travel to Cuba can range up to$7,500 for the first trip and $10,000 for subsequent trips.

OFAC resolved more than 200 such cases for "a standard$1,000 settlement" from 2001 to 2004, Kadidal said, anddismissed many others with no fine at all.

Under the Obama administration, which has relaxedrestrictions on travel to Cuba, OFAC has generally pursued casesagainst financial institutions and manufacturers that violatethe embargo, rather than individual travelers.

The case is Sanders vs. Szuben, Case No. 12-601 cv in theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.